I love old, public domain books. I prefer to have them as books, though, even though I can get them for free on a computer screen. David Warlick suggests using the self-publishing company, Lulu, to get your hands on public domain books for cheaper:
Now, lets step back even further to a world of writing that spans the centuries — archives of both obscure and famous books that are in the public domain and included in a number of online archives, such as:
- The Internet Archive (300,000 public domain books)
- Google Books (1.7 million public domain books)
- Universal Library (600,000 public domain books)
- Project Gutenberg (20,000 public domain books)
- WikiSource (69,000 pages)
For example, Caesar’s Column, written by Ignatius Donnelly in 1891. The full text is available here, at the Internet Archive. I want to read it, but not on my computer screen, and certainly not on one of those new-fangled Kindle things. Load the text into your word processor, save it as a PDF, and upload it to Lulu, or other print-on-demand service.
2 responses so far ↓
1 chris holdridge // Feb 21, 2008 at 5:39 pm
I tried Lulu…and what’s cool is that they’ll format the book digitally and send you a sample and a price before you have to do anything. It’s not SUPER cheap if you can find a used paperback on Amazon; but certainly if something is way out of print, it’s the way to go.
Stab me in the eyes before you give me one-o-them Kindles. Oh, look, another $400 gadget to spill coffee on!
2 Ryan // Feb 22, 2008 at 1:26 am
Now that is a great idea. I am addicted to project gutenburg, but it isn’t exactly feasible to print of books and books.
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